COLOMBIA
Army Killings Rear Head
in Presidential Campaign
By Constanza Vieira
BOGOTA (IPS) - Colombian
presidential candidate Antanas Mockus
said he "shares the horror" over the
so-called "false positives" -- young
civilians killed by the army and passed
off as guerrilla casualties in the
military's counterinsurgency campaign.
The phenomenon is "an extreme
manifestation of the short-cut culture,
the anything goes culture," the former
Bogotá mayor, who has a real shot at
winning the presidency in Sunday's
elections or -- more likely -- in a June
runoff, told foreign journalists
Wednesday.
Members of more than 30 army battalions
recruited young men with false job
offers and took them to faraway
locations, where they were shot and
dressed up as left-wing rebels (or less
frequently as far-right paramilitaries)
and passed off as combat casualties.
This "body count" system used incentives
like weekend passes, cash bonuses,
promotions and trips abroad to reward
soldiers and officers for "results" in
the country's nearly five-decade civil
war.
The phenomenon really took off after
right-wing President Álvaro Uribe first
took office in 2002, and reached a peak
when Mockus's main rival, Juan Manuel
Santos, was defence minister from July
2006 to May 2009.
The "false positives" scandal broke in
the press in September 2008.
The attorney general's office is
investigating 2,077 cases of
extrajudicial killings presumably
committed by the security forces,
including 274 in 2006 and 505 in 2007.
The number of cases identified then
dropped to 156 in 2008 and to seven
cases, involving 16 victims, to 2009.
The human rights monitoring database at
the Jesuit Centre of Investigation and
Popular Education (CINEP) in Bogotá has
documented 501 cases involving 1,113
victims of extrajudicial killings
between 2001 and 2009. But it clarifies
that its investigations do not cover the
entire country.
The latest polls indicate that Mockus
and former defence minister Santos, the
candidate of the pro-Uribe Party of the
U, will face off in a second round on
Jun. 20, because neither is likely to
garner 50 percent of the vote Sunday.
Mockus stated: "I'm sure that neither
the president (Uribe) nor the minister
(Santos) were masterminds behind the
false positives."
He pointed out that it was Santos's
predecessor in the Defence Ministry,
Camilo Ospina, who issued, in November
2005, a secret directive offering
incentives for "positives" or casualties
in the counterinsurgency effort.
Mockus compared that instruction to a
U.S. army directive during the Vietnam
War that led to the infamous March 1968
massacre by U.S. troops of at least 350
unarmed women, children and old men in
the village of My Lai.
The candidate, a mathematics professor,
philosopher and two-time former mayor,
said "the tragic thing is that
incentive-based systems make the people
involved go crazy.
"Is the tragedy solved by judging these
two people?" Mockus asked, referring to
Uribe and Santos. What can be judged, he
stated, is "the eventual level of
negligence in detecting and correcting
the situation.
"I do not believe they are legally
responsible, but I do see a moral, or
perhaps political, responsibility," he
said.
Santos insists that when he was defence
minister, he and President Uribe
"denounced the problem and reached the
decision that had to be taken, with
transparency in front of the whole
country." He says a total of 15
measures, "which were effective," were
adopted to counter the phenomenon.
In November 2007, Santos issued a new
directive that provided rewards for
captured and "demobilised" combatants,
rather than offering incentives for
officers who showed the fewest army
casualties and the largest number of
enemy casualties.
"Reports of false positives were
drastically reduced after November 2008;
they fell by a factor of over 100,"
Santos recently stated, repeating what
he has said on every occasion that the
issue has been raised in the campaign.
But it was not until October 2008 that
the government dismissed 27 army
officers during an unexpected visit to
Colombia by United Nations High
Commissioner for Human Rights Navi
Pillay.
"Were the dismissals a response when
they realised what was going on? Or when
they realised that the world had
realised what was going on?" Mockus
asked.
But he noted that the Colombian justice
system would have to fail in its attempt
to clarify the killings "before the
international system would have
jurisdiction."
Impunity for the perpetrators is what 16
families of "false positive" victims
from Soacha, a sprawling working-class
suburb to the south of Bogotá, fear.
Over the last 10 days, 39 members of the
military implicated in the extrajudicial
killings were released on bail, although
25 -- including colonels and majors --
are still in prison awaiting trial.
The strategy of their defence lawyers is
to use delaying tactics and secure their
release from preventive detention on the
grounds that they have not been formally
indicted within 90 days of their arrest,
as established by Colombian law.
At the same time, the military justice
system is demanding that the cases be
transferred to its jurisdiction.
Mothers and widows of the victims have
received death threats. The brother of
one of the victims was killed, and a
noncommissioned officer who reported an
extrajudicial killing was murdered as
well. The Mothers of Soacha, as the
women are now known, sent a letter
Monday to International Criminal Court
(ICC) chief prosecutor Luis Moreno
Ocampo.
Over the last two years, a series of
legal, political and other "de facto
impunity" mechanisms have undermined the
possibility of getting at the truth and
obtaining justice and comprehensive
reparations, says the letter, which
calls for the ICC to take a hand in the
matter.
Lawyer and journalist Felipe Zuleta, who
produced the documentary "Poverty, a
crime that is paid with death", asked
the attorney general's office in January
to investigate Uribe and Santos for
collusion -- that is, "negligence on the
part of government officials with
respect to crimes against humanity," he
said in response to a question from IPS.
Zuleta said the argument set forth by
Santos "is complete proof." He
maintained that the fact that the number
of "false positive" killings has plunged
since "the government found out… means
it was a controlled crime.
"A controlled crime is one where you
give an order and it stops. Uncontrolled
crime is where the state, despite its
efforts, can't do anything to stop it,"
the journalist said.
The Mothers of Soacha are indignant that
Santos is a presidential candidate. "Not
because he pulled the trigger," said
one, "but because he was the
commander-in-chief of the armed forces,
and has to assume responsibility."
The United Nations' special rapporteur
on extrajudicial executions, Philip
Alston, released a 36-report page
Thursday that says the Colombian
security forces committed "a significant
number" of "false positive" killings
over the past decade, and that the
number of murders began to climb after
2004. |
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